“I repeat, your grandmother’s a smart woman.”
“She is, but then she doesn’t know the facts behind our manufactured engagement.”
“Do you think she needs to?”
“What I think,” Sarah said slowly, “is that we need to put the brakes on this runaway train.”
Putting the brakes on was a long step from her earlier insistence they call things off. Maybe he didn’t face as many hurdles as he’d thought.
His tension easing by imperceptible degrees, Dev cocked his head. “How do you propose we do that?”
“We step back. Take some time to assess this attraction we both seem to...”
“Attraction?” He shook his head. “Sorry, sweetheart, I can’t let you get away with that one. You and I both know we’ve left attraction in the dust.”
“You’re right.”
She rested her chin on her knee, obviously searching for the right word. Impatience bit at him, but he reined it in. If he hadn’t learned anything else today, he’d discovered Sarah could only be pushed so far.
“I won’t lie,” she said slowly. “What I feel for you is so different from anything I’ve ever experienced before. I think it’s love. No, I’m pretty sure it’s love.”
That was all he needed to hear. He started toward her, but she stopped him with a quick palms-up gesture.
“What I’m not sure of, Dev, is whether love’s enough to overcome the fact that we barely know each other.”
“I know all I need to know about you.”
“Oh. Right.” She made a wry face. “I forgot about the background investigation.”
He wouldn’t apologize. He’d been up front with her about that. But he did attempt to put it in perspective.
“The investigation provided the externals, Sarah. The time we’ve spent together, as brief as it’s been, provided the essentials.”
“Really?” She lifted a brow. “What’s my favorite color? Am I a dog or a cat person? What kind of music do I like?”
“You consider those essentials?” he asked, genuinely curious.
“They’re some of the bits and pieces that constitute the whole. Don’t you think we should see how those pieces fit together before getting in any deeper?”
“I don’t, but you obviously do.”
If this was a business decision, he would ruthlessly override what he privately considered trivial objections. He’d made up his mind. He knew what he wanted.
Sarah did, too, apparently. With a flash of extremely belated insight, Dev realized she wanted to be courted. More to the point, she deserved to be courted.
Lady Sarah St. Sebastian might work at a magazine that promoted flashy and modern and ultrachic, but she held to old-fashioned values that he’d come to appreciate as much as her innate elegance and surprising sensuality. Her fierce loyalty to her sister, for instance. Her bone-deep love for the duchess. Her refusal to accept anything from him except her grandmother’s emerald ring, and then only on a temporary basis.
He could do old-fashioned. He could do slow and courtly. Maybe. Admittedly, he didn’t have a whole lot of experience in either. Moving out and taking charge came as natural to him as breathing. But if throttling back on his more aggressive instincts was what she wanted, that was what she’d get.
“Okay, we’ll do it your way.”
* * *
He started toward her again. Surprised and more than a little wary of his relatively easy capitulation, Sarah let her raised foot slip to the floor and pushed out of her chair.
He stopped less than a yard away. Close enough to kiss, which she had to admit she wouldn’t have minded all that much at this point. He settled for a touch instead. He kept it light, just a brush of his fingertips along the underside of her chin.
“We’ll kick off phase two,” he promised in a tone that edged toward deep and husky. “No negotiated contracts this time, no self-imposed deadlines. Just you and me, learning each other’s little idiosyncrasies. If that’s what you really want...?”
She nodded, although the soft dance of his fingers under her chin and the proximity of his mouth made it tough to stay focused.
“It’s what I really want.”
“All right, I’ll call Patrick.”
“Who? Oh, right. Your executive assistant. Excuse me for asking, but what does he have to do with this?”
“He’s going to clear my calendar. Indefinitely. He’ll blow every one of his fuses, but he’ll get it done.”
His fingers made another pass. Sarah’s thoughts zinged wildly between the little pinpricks of pleasure he was generating and that “indefinitely.”
“What about your schedule?” he asked. “How much time can you devote to phase two?”
“My calendar’s wide-open, too. I quit my job.”
“You didn’t have to do that. I’m already past the business with the photographer.”
“You may be,” she retorted. “I’m not.”
He absorbed that for a moment. “All right. Here’s what we’ll do, then. We give our statements to the Brigade criminelle at nine tomorrow morning and initiate phase two immediately after. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
“Good. I’ll have a car waiting at eight-thirty to take us downtown. See you down in the lobby then.”
He leaned in and brushed his lips over hers.
“Good night, Sarah.”
She’d never really understood that old saying about being hoisted with your own petard. It had something to do with getting caught up in a medieval catapult, she thought. Or maybe hanging by one foot in a tangle of ropes from the mast of a fourteenth-century frigate.
Either situation would pretty much describe her feelings when Dev crossed the room and let himself out.
Sarah spent hours tossing and turning and kicking herself for her self-imposed celibacy. As a result, she didn’t fall asleep until almost one and woke late the next morning.
The first thing she did was roll over in bed and grab her cell phone from the nightstand to check for messages. Still nothing from Gina, dammit, but Alexis had left two voice mails apologizing for what she termed an unfortunate misunderstanding and emphatically refusing to accept
